No economic fire without smoke?

Exaggeration of China's environmental problems does not help to resolve them

AS CHINA explodes economically, it is imploding ecologically. The flipside of the country's rapid growth is a worrying degradation of its environment. According to the World Bank, it is home to 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, while deforestation (begun centuries ago) has turned a quarter of the country into desert. With only a tenth as many cars, Beijing pumps out as much carbon monoxide as Los Angeles and Tokyo combined.

As described by Elizabeth Economy, a director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank, the scale of China's environmental degradation is shocking. Her book is particularly strong in its examination of the peculiarly Chinese reasons—beyond the country's rapid development and huge population pressure—that lie behind this: the leadership's obsession with short-term growth to preserve social stability, whatever the ultimate cost, is one; the weak rule of law and a tradition of devolving power to the regions, where watchdogs and polluters are often in collusion, is another. On paper, there is a ministry and a set of laws designed to protect the environment. In practice, China's environmental agency, SEPA, has a staff of 300, a small fraction of its American equivalent. Moreover, it has little standing in Beijing and practically no resources.

There is, of course, a good reason why America pays more attention to its environment than China does: it can afford to. Until more people get richer, China may not have the resources or the willpower to care much about pollution. Ms Economy more or less ignores this trade-off and concentrates on the negative consequences of economic growth. And at times she uses questionable statistics to support her argument—for example, her assertion that children living in Chinese cities are doing the equivalent of smoking two packets of cigarettes a day is lifted from a local newspaper and is hard to verify.

Ms Economy holds out the hope that local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) will compensate for China's institutional shortcomings. By one count there are now 2m of these, and the book includes profiles of several courageous individuals who are trying to change things. But the vast majority of them are no more than individuals fighting single issues with little funding. The Communist Party immediately outlaws anything more ambitious that could threaten its authority.

The book pays insufficient attention to another influence for change: the positive impact of foreign multinationals. While these may not operate with quite the same clean technology as they do at home, their standards are still far higher than those of their local rivals.

Chopped and changed

China has been at war with its environment for centuries. Mao's declaration that man must “conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature” echoed traditional Confucian beliefs of social order, in which the earth's role was to provide for humanity. Mark Elvin, an environmental historian and China scholar, chronicles how early emperors chopped down forests, diverted rivers and laid waste to fields as part of their constant warfare. As a result, in 4,000 years the elephants of his title retreated from all over China into a tiny corner of the south-west.

Mr Elvin's book is massive in scope and peppered with classic texts and ancient Chinese poetry. But the end result is disappointing. Its rambling sentences and mathematical equations leave the reader more irritated than fascinated.

While Mr Elvin details the past, Norman Myers, an Oxford University academic, looks to the future. His book, which is as lightweight as Mr Elvin's is ponderous, describes the imminent rise of 1.1 billion “middle-class consumers” in the developing world—40% of them from China and India alone—and the pressure they will put on the world's ecology. Mr Myers reels out statistics to prove that buying cars and washing machines will ruin developing countries' environments. But once again he ignores the changed attitudes to pollution that come with greater wealth.

China is using its natural resources to lift the living standards of its people as rapidly as possible—as the developed world did (and still does). Its main problem is the huge short-term cost of this: the World Bank estimates an annual 8-12% of China's GDP now goes on medical bills, lost work and disaster relief. This sum is growing and could eventually threaten economic growth itself. Another concern is political: in democratic countries, affluence leads to demands for a cleaner environment. In China, there is no mechanism for people's wishes to influence government policy directly, unless (and until) the Communist Party loses its grip on power.